By NICOLAS RAPOLD

November 21, 2013

Burkhard von Harder’s “Die Narbe” (“The Scar”) bears witness to the legacy of the Berlin Wall in rather literal-minded fashion by filming the wall’s perimeter from a helicopter. Far from tapping Germany’s especially rich and haunted interplay between architecture and memory, the movie suggests, most immediately, that not all aerial photography is equal.

One problem with Mr. von Harder’s project is his decision to shoot in deepest winter, when the city and its environs are an indistinct gray-and-white expanse, at least as captured and flattened-out here. While it’s not necessary for the film to rival the mesmerizing devastation of, say, the Alberta tar pits surveyed from above in “Petropolis” or the dazzling toylike distortions of Olivo Barbieri’s cityscapes, a more disciplined composition and control of tempo would help.

Mr. von Harder inscribes this storied geography with audio quotations from Willy Brandt, Walter Ulbricht and others, and what sound like recordings of crank calls to the Stasi. Together they give the sense of listening in on history, but over all, “Die Narbe,” scored with music-as-wallpaper by F. M. Einheit, comes across as more of an extravagant gesture than a fully realized artistic conceit.

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.
Directed by Burkhard von Harder
In German, with English subtitles
1 hour 16 minutes; not rated